Early spring is when all of my favorite wildflowers bloom. My garden has a few – hepatica, spring beauty, trillium – but the best place to see nearly every Minnesota ephemeral is the Eloise Butler Wildflower Garden. I visited on a sunny afternoon three weeks ago.

White trout lily:

and yellow trout lily:

Wild ginger’s shy flower:

Hepatica rising out of the carpet of oak leaves:

False rue anemone:

Bloodroot is my absolute favorite, possibly because they’re so delicate and so short-lived. This time I decided to take video of flowers blowing in the wind, with birds singing and bees buzzing in and out:

There was even a turkey roaming around, not at all concerned that I was watching:

Earlier this week, I returned to see what’s happening now. There are many more varieties, and the brown groundcover is quickly being replaced by new, green growth.

The bloodroot I filmed is long gone, the leaves growing large but being overtaken by invasive periwinkle:

Many varieties of violets:

Two-leaved toothwort:

I was wondering whether there are any jack-in-the-pulpits and literally before I finished that thought, I found one hiding among the leaves:

These two invasives look so similar except for their color, and they have similar common names: devil’s paintbrush and Glaucous King-devil. (The yellow one may instead be meadow hawkweed; I can’t tell the difference. If so, I’d like to switch to the other common name for the orange one – orange hawkweed – so these two flowers still match.)

Pretty but invasive: daisy and birds-foot trefoil

Back to the natives! Fortunately for me, the park’s visitors center compiled a list of the flowers that were blooming, so I had a head start on identifying those I didn’t already know:

One-flowered pyrola points nearly straight down, so I had to nearly lie on the ground to see its face.

Shinleaf, pink corydalis, twinflower

A new Instagram friend saw spotted coralroot a week earlier, an orchid I was disappointed to miss! I settled for a few black-eyed susans that were starting to bloom.